The Racketeer Page 0,6

up tomorrow, another day is behind you. The days add up; the weeks run together; the months become years. You realize how tough you are, how you can function and survive because you have no choice.

"Any idea what you'll do?" he asks. I get this same question every month now, as if my release were just around the corner. Patience, I remind myself. He's my father. And he's here! That counts for a lot.

"Not really. It's too far away."

"I'd start thinking about it if I were you," he says, certain that he would know exactly what to do if he were in my shoes.

"I just finished the third level of Spanish," I say with some pride. In my Brown Gang there is a good friend, Marco, who is an excellent language teacher. Drugs.

"Looks like we'll all be speaking Spanish before long. They're taking over."

Henry has little patience with immigrants, anybody with an accent, people from New York and New Jersey, anyone on welfare, anyone unemployed, and he thinks the homeless should be rounded up and placed in camps that would resemble, in his view, something worse than Guantanamo.

We had harsh words a few years ago, and he threatened to stop the visits. Bickering is a waste of time. I'm not going to change him. He's kind enough to drive over, the least I can do is behave. I am the convicted felon; he is not. He's the winner; I'm the loser. This seems important to Henry, though I don't know why. Maybe it's because I had college and law school, something he never dreamed of.

"I'll probably leave the country," I say. "Go somewhere where I can use the Spanish, somewhere like Panama or Costa Rica. Warm weather, beaches, people with darker skin. They don't care about criminal records or who's been to prison."

"The grass is always greener, huh?"

"Yes, Dad, when you're in prison, every place has greener grass. What am I supposed to do? Go back home, maybe become an unlicensed paralegal doing research for some tiny firm that can't afford me? Maybe become a bail bondsman? How about a private detective? There are not a lot of options."

He's nodding along. We've had this conversation at least a dozen times. "And you hate the government," he says.

"Oh yes. I hate the federal government, the FBI, the U.S. Attorneys, the federal judges, the fools who run the prisons. There is so much of it I hate. I'm sitting here doing ten years for a noncrime because a hotshot U.S. Attorney needed to jack up his kill quota. And if the government can nail my ass for ten years with no evidence, just think of all the possibilities now that I have the words 'Convicted Felon' tattooed on my forehead. I'm outta here, Pop, just as soon as I can make the break."

He's nodding and smiling. Sure, Mal.
Chapter 3
Given the importance of what they do, and the controversies that often surround them, and the violent people they sometimes confront, it is remarkable that in the history of this country only four active federal judges have been murdered.

The Honorable Raymond Fawcett has just become number five.

His body was found in the small basement of a lakeside cabin he had built and frequently used on weekends. When he did not show up for a trial on Monday morning, his law clerks panicked and called the FBI. In due course the agents found the crime scene. The cabin was in a heavily wooded part of southwest Virginia, on the side of a mountain, at the edge of a small, pristine body of water known locally as Lake Higgins. The lake is not found on most road maps.

There appeared to be no forced entry, no fight or struggle, nothing but two dead bodies, bullet holes in both heads, and an empty metal safe in the basement. Judge Fawcett was found near the safe, shot twice in the back of the head, definitely an execution, and there was a large pool of dried blood on the floor around him. The first expert on the scene guessed that the judge had been dead for at least two days. He had left the office around three on Friday afternoon, according to one of his law clerks, with plans to drive straight to the cabin and spend the weekend hard at work there.

The other body was that of Naomi Clary, a thirty-four-year-old divorced mother of two who had recently been hired by Judge Fawcett as a secretary. The judge, who